FILE - Utah Jazz Head Coach Quinn Snyder gives instructions to his team during the first half of an NBA basketball game, March 12, 2022, in Salt Lake City. Atlanta Hawks general manager Landry Fields said Wednesday, Feb. 22, 2023, that Snyder, the former Utah coach, will be “somebody we will consider” in the search to replace Nate McMillan. The Hawks fired McMillan on Tuesday, Feb. 21, and Fields stressed the team's eighth-place standing in the Eastern Conference is “not acceptable” for a team which advanced to the conference finals in 2021. (AP Photo/Adam Fondren, File)
Adam Fondren, FRE / Associated PressWhen Quin Snyder needed a life preserver 16 years ago, it was the Spurs who threw it to him. They pulled him onboard, handed him a towel, and put him to work at a time when few others in basketball wanted to give him that chance.
In the poetic ending to this, Snyder comes back to return the favor. He reunites with the CEO who recruited him out of high school, accepts the torch from the mentor who welcomed him into his inner sanctum, and shows the same belief in a rebuilding franchise as the franchise once showed in a beleaguered young coach.
Well, the poetic ending isn’t going to happen. Snyder isn’t going to work for R.C. Buford, and he isn’t going to replace Gregg Popovich, and we know this because he just signed a reported five-year contract to become head coach of the Atlanta Hawks.
There are no hard feelings here. The Spurs’ organizational admiration of Snyder continues unabated, while Snyder may or may not have been playing a hunch about how long it will be before the San Antonio coaching job comes open. Even as a team-record losing streak stretched to 16 games, a 74-year-old Popovich has given no indication he’s likely to step away any time soon.
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So the Spurs are free to wish Snyder well, and they probably do, except for one little catch: Sixteen years after essentially saving Snyder’s career, they now stand to benefit from his failure.
That might sound cold, but the NBA is a cold business, and the Spurs are going to need every break they can get as they try to make another climb from the bottom of the league’s standings to playoff relevance again.
At the moment, future draft picks are among the Spurs’ most important assets. And thanks to last summer’s trade of Dejounte Murray, many of those assets are directly tied to how well the Hawks play over the next four years.
In 2025 and in 2027, the Spurs will get Atlanta’s first-round picks. In 2026, they’ll have the right to swap places with Atlanta in the first round. None of those picks are protected in any way. Essentially, the worse Snyder does as coach of the Hawks, the better it will be for the Spurs’ long-term future.
And to be sure, Snyder’s tenure in Atlanta has at least some potential for disaster. In the two seasons since they made the Eastern Conference Finals, the Hawks have hit a wall, getting bounced from the first round in 2022 and hovering around the No. 8 spot in the conference this season.
Trae Young still hasn’t shown if he’s capable of being the best player on a championship contender. Murray has not been convinced to stick around past next year, when he’ll be a free agent. And the Hawks have stagnated during a time when the best teams in the East — the Bucks, the Celtics, the 76ers and the Cavaliers — have shown no signs of regressing.
The good news for the Hawks, though, is that Snyder, 56, isn’t likely to find any of this daunting. Daunting was the way his career prospects looked in 2006, when his seven-year stint as coach at Missouri came to an ugly end in the wake of an NCAA investigation into alleged recruiting violations and three subpar seasons on the court.
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For the better part of a year, he had nothing to do with basketball. Then, in May 2007, came an unexpected opportunity. The Austin Toros, of what was then known as the NBA developmental league, had an opening as a head coach. The Toros were not yet owned and operated by the Spurs, but they had an affiliation with the NBA club.
Snyder received an important recommendation from Buford, then the Spurs general manager, who decades earlier as a Kansas assistant had tried in vain to recruit Snyder to the Jayhawks. Snyder went to Duke instead, but the two remained friends. And once Snyder landed the job in Austin?
He started visiting Spurs practices, and gradually he and Popovich figured out how much they could help each other. Before the rest of the league caught on to the benefits of making an NBA team and a G-League team part of the same system, with the same terminology and same practice plans, Popovich and Snyder jumped ahead of the curve.
Snyder used that break to land multiple gigs as an NBA assistant, then an eight-year, mostly successful run as the head coach in Utah. When he stepped down last summer, some naturally assumed he’d be in the running in San Antonio if Popovich retired.
And while coming full-circle might have been poetic? That doesn’t mean it would have worked.
So now the man who caught a life preserver from the Spurs 16 years ago has a new goal.
He’ll try his best not to throw them one.
mfinger@express-news.net
Twitter: @mikefinger
